HMS Belvoir (L32): Sutton in Ashfield's Destroyer From the Arctic to the Adriatic

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Belvoir was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 4 July 1940, one of the Type III Hunt Class escort destroyers of the 1940 War Emergency Programme. The Type IIIs gave up one of the three twin 4 inch gun mountings of the earlier Hunts to carry two torpedo tubes, so that they could fight as destroyers as well as escorts.

She was laid down on 14 October 1940, launched on 18 November 1941 and completed on 29 March 1942, the second ship of the name. Like the rest of her class she was named after a fox hunt, the Belvoir in Leicestershire, and her badge was a peacock's head with a ducal coronet.

In February 1942, during Warship Week, the people of Sutton in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire raised the money to adopt her. Her first captain was Lieutenant John Bush.

The Arctic

She went to Scapa Flow to work up, but within days of arriving she was taken into the screen of the Home Fleet. In April 1942 she sailed with King George V, Duke of York and the carrier Victorious as they gave distant cover to the Arctic convoys PQ 14 and QP 10, in case the Tirpitz came out.

At the end of the month she sailed from Hvalfjord again with King George V, the American battleship Washington and Victorious covering PQ 15 and QP 11. It was in that force, in fog on 1 May, that King George V ran down the destroyer Punjabi and cut her in two, and a day later the cruiser Edinburgh was lost defending QP 11.

Round the Cape

She had been meant for the Eastern Fleet. On 11 May she sailed with the cruiser Mauritius as escort to the troop convoy WS 19, by Freetown and Cape Town to Durban, with the cruiser Shropshire taking over for the last stage.

But the Mediterranean Fleet had lost so many destroyers off Greece and Crete and on the Malta convoys that she was lent to the 5th Destroyer Flotilla at Alexandria instead. She took the armed merchant cruiser Moreton Bay up to Kilindini in Kenya and went on up the Red Sea.

On 23 July she bombarded Mersa Matruh behind the German lines with the cruiser Dido, and two days later she escorted the damaged submarine Porpoise into Port Said.

Tobruk and Malta

On 14 September she and Aldenham sailed from Alexandria with the tug Brigand to meet the cruiser Coventry and the destroyer Zulu, both crippled in the disastrous raid on Tobruk, but both had sunk before the tug could reach them. In October, as the Eighth Army attacked at El Alamein, she took part in two seaborne feints along the coast to draw the German reserves away from the real attack.

On 17 November she sailed in the close escort of MW 13, Operation Stoneage, with nine other Hunts. The cruiser Arethusa was torpedoed by an aircraft on the second day, but all four merchant ships got into Malta on 20 November, and the long siege of the island was broken.

In December she was in the escort of MW 14, Operation Portcullis, covered by the cruiser Orion, and then brought a convoy of empty ships back from Malta to Port Said. From then on the convoys ran almost every week.

The Welshman

On 1 February 1943 the fast minelayer Welshman, which had run so many cargoes of ammunition, food and aircraft spares into Malta through the worst of the siege, was torpedoed by U-617 east of Tobruk and capsized. Belvoir and Tetcott picked up more than a hundred of her men between them.

In May Belvoir was one of the destroyers patrolling off Cape Bon to stop the German and Italian armies escaping from Tunisia by sea.

Sicily and Salerno

For the landings in Sicily she sailed from Alexandria on 3 July in Escort Group Q with her sister Dulverton, hunting submarines along the convoy's route, and on 10 July she was off the beaches south west of Syracuse, patrolling against the E-boats sent out to attack the landing ships.

In September she escorted one of the assault convoys to Salerno and stayed off the beachhead for the gunfire support and patrols of those hard first days.

The Aegean

In October she went back to Alexandria for the fight for the Dodecanese islands, where the Germans had command of the air from the start. She carried troops and stores to the island garrisons, hunted the German invasion convoys at night with her sister Beaufort, and fired in support of the troops ashore.

On 30 October a German bomb went straight through her stabiliser compartment and failed to go off. One of her ratings got it out and over the side, and was decorated for it.

On 12 November, as the Germans invaded Leros, she was searching for their landing craft with Faulknor, Beaufort, Dulverton, the destroyer Echo and the Greek Pindos. In the early hours of the next morning Dulverton was hit by one of the new German glider bombs and wrecked.

Belvoir picked up 109 of her men and then sank the burning hulk with a torpedo. Leros fell on 16 November, and the campaign was over.

The Adriatic

She spent the first half of 1944 based at Algiers on convoy work in the western and central Mediterranean. That June she was offered to the Free French on loan, but they did not take her.

In August she sailed from Naples in the escort of a stores convoy for the landings in the south of France, with her sisters Blackmore, Aldenham and others.

That autumn she moved to the Adriatic, escorting convoys and supporting the troops fighting ashore. On 20 September 1944 she and Whaddon fought a night action with German E-boats, and on 4 October she attacked a U-boat off the Italian coast, without result.

Aldenham, which had sailed with her on so many convoys, was mined in the Adriatic that December, the last British destroyer lost in the war. Belvoir stayed in the Adriatic and on the convoys to the Greek ports until the German surrender, and the photograph at the top of this page was taken on 29 May 1945, three weeks after the war in Europe ended.

Reserve and Bo'ness

She came home in July 1945 and paid off into reserve at Portsmouth, moved to Harwich in 1950 and back to Portsmouth in 1952, and went into extended reserve in 1955. In 1957 she was placed on the disposal list and sold for breaking up, and she arrived at P and W MacLellan's yard at Bo'ness on the Firth of Forth in tow on 21 October 1957. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.